The MIT Open Documentary Lab joins our friends and colleagues in public media, the arts and sciences, and the humanities in urging people to speak out and take action against President Trump’s budget proposal. The proposal would end funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and significantly reduce funding for research in the sciences. Our lab is founded...

Codes & Modes: ReFraming Reality, Virtuality & Non-Fiction Media aims to create an intervention into the uncritical excitement about virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning to establish a space for conversations about long-term socio-cultural and neurobiological impacts. Presenters will discuss how theorists, activists and artists can develop useful frameworks to explore the complex implications of using these emerging technologies. Featured speakers include Lev Manovich (Director of the...

This coming semester, Open Documentary Lab’s William Uricchio, Sandra Rodriguez and Deniz Tortum will be teaching the Hacking VR course at the Comparative Media Studies department. Course Description Mens et manus … mind and hand … Hacking VR will engage both. What better way to explore a new technology than to push it to its limits, to break it, to re-imagine it, and to rebuild it in unexpected ways? Offered as...

Our recent conference brought together scholars, technologists, and artists from around the globe to discuss the language, implications, and future of virtual reality and documentary. Watch the full livestream here. VR is capturing the imagination of documentary storytellers, journalists, artists, technologists and investors all over the world. An industry is emerging. Yet for all of its enthusiasts, VR has its skeptics. For all it is talked about, VR can be deeply...

COME/IN/DOC – Collaborative Meta Interactive Documentary – is a transmedia meta-documentary that reflects on the interactive documentary. It consists of 3 interconnected parts: a documentary series, a multimedia platform and exhibitions. This is the result of 4 years of intensive research (2012-2016) conducting interviews with 60 experts in the field of interactive documentary with the aim of answering a basic question: what is an interactive documentary? From this starting...

Originally published in Confessions of an Aca-Fan, the original Weblog of Henry Jenkins. Charting Documentary’s Futures: An Interview with William Uricchio [Part Four] The report’s focus on immersion as a dimension of news and documentary may be new to many readers, despite the New York Time’s recent venture into virtual reality. So, can you share a bit more about the current state of immersive journalism and why you think this...

Originally published in Confessions of an Aca-Fan, the original Weblog of Henry Jenkins. Charting Documentary’s Futures | An Interview with William Uricchio [Part Three] On the documentary side, the American public has probably never had access to as many different documentaries as they do now — more are playing on television, more are getting theatrical runs, more are playing on the festival circuit, more are available through online platforms. So,...

Originally published in Confessions of an Aca-Fan, the original Weblog of Henry Jenkins. Charting Documentary’s Futures: An Interview with William Uricchio [Part Two] You argue that the story should dictate the form, yet many aspects of the form of American journalism — the inverted pyramid for example and the core shape of the lead paragraph — have remain fixed without regard to the story. Some traditional journalists would argue that...

Profile: William Uricchio of MIT’s Open Documentary Lab from Submarine Channel on Vimeo. Originally published in Confessions of an Aca-Fan, the original Weblog of Henry Jenkins. Charting Documentary’s Futures: An Interview with William Uricchio [Part One] For the better part of a decade, William Uricchio and I worked side by side, partners in crime, as we forged the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. I came to lean heavily on...